Author Archives: Dorothy Max Prior

About Dorothy Max Prior

Dorothy Max Prior is the editor of Total Theatre Magazine, and is also a performer, writer, dramaturg and choreographer/director working in theatre, dance, installation and outdoor arts. Much of her work is sited in public spaces or in venues other than regular theatres. She also writes essays and stories, some of which are published and some of which languish in bottom drawers – and she teaches drama, dance and creative non-fiction writing. www.dorothymaxprior.com

Enter the Urban Labyrinth

Dorothy Max Prior is seduced by Brazilian company Cambar Coletivo’s playful invasion of public spaces

It is mid-afternoon on a hot summer’s day, and a group of people are taking a walk along the dusty streets of Barao Geraldo, a small town near Campinas in Brazil. Nothing unusual there, perhaps – but the group have an odd and interesting energy, attracting the attention of passers-by and car drivers. They move as one organic body, taking silent collective decisions on when to speed up or slow down; when to cross roads; when to pause to stare at a torn poster on a wall or at the tinsel wigs in a Carnival shop window. As the pack veers off the pavement and onto a roadside grassy area, leaves crunch underfoot. As we surprise ourselves by walking through the open door of a bar, the old men sitting on the inevitable yellow plastic chairs turn away from the football match on the screen to stare at us, the interlopers.

So, this is day three of Labirinto Urbano – estratégias para se perder’ (Urban Labyrinth – strategies for getting lost), the halfway point of a week-long programme created and led by Cambar Coletivo. Sitting somewhere between a workshop and a collective creation process, the week is a full-on immersion in contemporary performance practice. It is held as part of Lume Theatre’s annual season of workshops, and as with all of the courses in this much-admired summer school, participants are a solid mix of experienced practitioners, younger artists, and students.

Walking – performative walking that is, in one form or another – is a key element of the collective’s work. The workshop times vary daily, and in one evening session, we are sent out onto the night-time streets armed with maps of our own creation. This map-making is a two-day process that starts with mapping our bodies, our feelings, our responses onto paper with coloured chalks and pens; then moves into finding ways to enter and navigate our maps; and eventually to alchemically reducing the map to its graphic essence.

Following my green-ink graphic – an anti-clockwise spiral, a sharp narrow point, and two big curved hills – leads me from the relatively safe and civilised streets dotted with samba bars and pizza parlours that are close to Lume’s base, into the less secure territories of the badly-lit track skirting the local wild park – a path I walk regularly in daylight but have never ventured down alone after dark. Strange noises from the forest and an odd smell of rotting meat almost send me scuttling back the way I came, but I persevere. As we take this particular walk, we are under instructions to make a continuous sound recording of our responses. It is arguable whether talking to myself into an iPhone actually makes me safer on the streets of Brazil, but there is something reassuring about the sound of my own voice. At one point I sing…

On another occasion, we are again out on the streets – this time paired up. One person is masked and the other leads them around, inviting them to touch, feel, and listen to what they are led to encounter. It’s a familiar theatre exercise for those of us who make site-responsive work – but this has an added twist. The eye-masks we wear feature an image of open eyes, giving the wearer a strange other-worldly appearance. As the exercise takes place in public space, the impression is of a team of man-machines manipulated around, or placed in the space like sculptures, an image to be enjoyed by anyone passing by.

The open-eyed eye-mask is an image I’ve encountered before – a familiar motif of the work of Flávio Rabelo, one of the four founder-members of Cambar Coletivo. I first met Flávio (and the other three members of the collective) when I took part in Zecura Ura’s DRIFT 2011, held in upstate Rio de Janeiro. All four were then members of Zecora Ura, creators of the highly acclaimed Hotel Medea project, which in its final incarnation became a midnight-to-dawn interactive performance that wowed audiences at London’s Southbank Centre, and won a whole raft of awards and accolades at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The Hotel Medea project, as well as being a major part of Flávio’s artistic work from 2006 to 2012, became the subject of his PhD at University of Campinas, studying under the tuition of Lume actor and researcher Renato Ferracini. Flávio and I also crossed paths in the BR-116 project, a season of Anglo-Brazilian performances in public spaces, created in collaboration with LIFT and held in London in September 2012, at which Flávio presented a piece called Take ]me[ a-way in which, masked and dressed in a long gown, he places himself in a vulnerable position, sitting or standing on a street corner, inviting passers-by to take him for a walk to anywhere in the vicinity, describing the walk to him if they wish.

Raquel Aguilera, whose background is in dance and movement theatre, was drawn into the world of Hotel Medea through a workshop in Rio led by the project’s directors, Jorge Lopes Ramos and Persis-Jade Maravala. Raquel saw the call and was interested in the opportunity to work with Persis Jade Maravala’s Grotowski-based processes, and also to work with Butoh and Capoeira Angola. Her curiosity was piqued – particularly about the inclusion of Capoeira Angola, an Afro-Brazilian cultural manifestation that was already a part of her ongoing work in popular and interactive forms of dance and performance. ‘I lived most of my life researching and learning dancing, singing and drumming’ she says, and goes on to talk of the celebratory-political performance world of popular demonstrations in Rio de Janeiro and Maranhão: ‘We occupied the squares and streets, holding street parties, and Capoeira Angola gatherings’ She talks of the desire to ‘legitimise public spaces as recreational spaces through rituals, play and joking’ – and in this I am reminded of the work of that late great Brazilian theatre-maker Augusto Boal. So with all this in her blood and in her heart, she took the plunge into what would become Hotel Medea, performing in all the incarnations of the show from then until its last manifestation in London and Brasilia in 2012. She talks of Hotel Medea as: ‘A daring and subversive project, which affected and radically transformed not only my way of being in a creative process, but also the mindset of life as a whole.’ She sees her time with Zecora Ura as providing the basis on which she and her Cambar Coletivo colleagues would build their future model of artistic coexistence.

For James Turpin, the only English member of Cambar Coletivo, the
path to Hotel Medea was a rather different one. Having initially met Zecora Ura’s director Jorge Lopes Ramos at Rose Bruford drama school, James lost contact when he moved to Paris to study at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq, but stumbled across an early-stage showing of scenes that would become part of Hotel Medea when these were presented at the late lamented Shunt Vaults at London Bridge. A year later, Zecora Ura were developing the second and third parts of the Medea trilogy in a residency at Shunt – with James in place as Medea’s errant husband, Jason. After five years of travelling to and fro between Europe to Brazil, James made the decision to move his family home to Brazil, and become one of the co-directors of the Brazilian Zecora Ura company.

Roberto Rezende (sometimes known as Carlos) is an artist with many strings to his bow. Having graduated in law from the University UNIRiO he went on to train at Brazil’s EAD/ECA/USP School of Dramatic Art. He has since worked with many different companies and projects. I know him through his work with Zecora Ura, but also as an actor with the renowned Sao Paulo company Teatro Vertigem, whose site-responsive show Bom Retiro was a beautifully-realised exploration of the old rag-trade neighbourhood of Sao Paulo. His contact with Zecora Ura began informally at a workshop held at Lume Theatre in 2007. He was subsequently selected to join a new ‘intensive meeting at dawn’ in the town of Miguel Pereira, in the state of Rio de Janeiro. He describes this experience as ‘an intense week of work and revelations’ – particularly the day spent in the woods of Vera Cruz (a kind of secluded ranch or farm) playing, without interruption, from midnight to six in the morning: ‘It was one of the most powerful encounters I’ve had as an artist,’ he says.

All four were thus at the heart of the development and realisation of Hotel Medea – as creators, performers, and co-directors of the producing company. But by 2012, changes in the dynamic of the Medea collective brought an end to the collaboration, and the UK-based wing of the company (led by Jorge Lopes Ramos and Persis-Jade Maravala) and the Brazil-based group parted company. Roberto, Raquel, James and Flávio decided to stay working together, developing working practices that had evolved through their time together on Hotel Medea, and instigating new ones. Flávio cites some of the examples of working practices from Medea that they were all keen to develop including: ‘Active participation with the audience in the structure of the actions; the multidisciplinary nature of our creations; and an interest in one-to-one works’. New ideas included the development of the Urban Labyrinth, which the group see as ‘our main project, our research lab’.

And so – what to call themselves? Cambar Coletivo has a lovely resonance and alliteration in Portuguese, but is difficult to translate into English. At least, ‘coletivo’ is easy enough: a collective. A collective that isn’t restricting itself to being a ‘theatre company’ but which is open to using whatever aspects of art, performance, theatre, dance, film or anything else that it chooses at any given moment. ‘Cambar’ is more difficult: one translation is ‘to jibe or to tilt’. There is a sense of something that is off-kilter, or jarring or re-aligning in some way. A sort of ‘playful instability’. The group wanted a name that wasn’t too easy to pin down; and also a name that included a verb; intimating a dynamic call to action.

In the past couple of years, Cambar Coletivo have instigated fifteen manifestations of the Urban Labyrinth: a workshop process that marries training and creation; a collective engagement with other artists in an investigation of the environment through games, mapping, walking, and other strategies for getting lost, and thus re-finding, the streets and public spaces of any given city or town.

Cambar have concurrently developed a number of other projects. They are, for example, starting work on their first collective performance work, called 3×1 Rhapsody in Red. In addition, they are developing other projects in cities around Brazil. In Diamantina, where Flávio lives, he has recently started Capistrana Líquida – vias de pertencimento (Capistrana liquid – ways of belonging) creating walking routes through the historic city centre of the town; each route having a theatrical element created in response to the route itself and to the architecture and characters linked to it. As Flávio says: ‘In a very clear way, this project is the result of research done with the Urban Labyrinth, and the goal now is to understand how our methodology can launch other creative processes’.

James mentions another aspect of the collective’s work: their involvement in the Festival de Apartamento, an important ongoing and itinerant performance festival in Brazil that occurs not within the confines of theatre spaces and galleries, but in private houses and apartments. (I’m reminded of the long-standing Home Live Art project in the UK – although this has moved into rather different public territories in recent years, so it is good to know that the model is proving successful elsewhere in the world). He also flags up another whole dimension: a step away from what we might call the performance art ghetto into the real-life favelas of Rio de Janeiro and Niteroi, running theatre and performance workshops for children and young adults, and very shortly working in the same way with a group of senior citizens. ‘Our interests are broader than just actor/performer training and professional artistic realms,’ says James, ‘Our work permeates into the day-to-day lives of people, organisations and spaces outside of the established artistic realm.’

Raquel comments on the widespread nature of the Cambar Coletivo’s work, in both the geographical and artistic sense, and on how the individual and the collective interact: ‘Our head office is virtual, and the occasional live meetings are always permeated by the freshness of longing and desire. What renews us and opens a space and time for each of us is the fact that although a collective, each of us has preserved his or her own individuality.’ Each group member’s own solo performance works and individual desires and ambitions stay an intrinsic part of their artistic life. Their modus operandi is ‘horizontal’ rather than vertical/hierarchical.

All four members of the collective speak with enormous respect of the others, and how they all feel drawn to continuing the working process in a spirit of equality and tolerance – which of course sometimes means tolerating differences. Roberto felt, on first leaving Hotel Medea, that he might need some time away from working in the intense intimacy of another collective – but quickly changed his mind. He cites many reasons for continuing the work together, not least a shared interest in ‘The boundary between private and public urban space’. He talks about being highly interested in ‘the friction between these boundaries and what is revealed in their intersection: different behaviours, actions, reflections, omissions, silences…’ He speaks of displacement, of re-choreographing the city through the artistic actions: ‘My presence in this space generates displacements, even if invisible.’

In my week with Cambar Coletivo, I experience a good number of these urban displacements. There is, for example, the afternoon we spend playing Pique Bandeira, a kind of Brazilian British Bulldog chase-and-capture team game that, once it has been tried the ‘normal’ way in the LUME studio, gets taken onto the streets of Barao Geraldo and turned into a massive endeavour staged over a pretty large section of the town centre. An envelope is placed by a plant pot outside a bar on the main drag. A few blocks away, another letter is placed by a lamppost opposite a small park. Team A and Team B compete to try to capture the letter in the other group’s territory. If tagged you have to lie down flat on your back on the ground where you were ‘hit’ and wait to be rescued. You can use your mobile phone to call for help. Thus, at any given time, some members of the group are stealthily stalking people, others are running hard and fast away from their would-be captors, and some are lying on the ground, perhaps blocking a pavement or an entrance to a shop, having a conversation on their mobile. Because the whole game extends over such a large territory, passers-by don’t necessarily grasp any sense of what is being played out – just find themselves encountering some pretty odd urban behaviour…

Not all of our week, though, is spent out on the streets. We also work on developing a solo ‘performance programme’. This aspect of Cambar Coletivo’s work is inspired by their meeting with Brazilian artist and researcher Eleonora Fabião, who defends her use of the term ‘programme’ (rather than, for example, ‘script’) thus: ‘It feels the most appropriate word to describe a type of action methodically calculated and conceptually polished, which generally requires extreme tenacity to be carried out, and approaching the improvisational only to the extent that it will not be tested in advance.’ Performance programmes are thus fundamentally different from devising from an empty space or creating from improvisational games. Rather than improvise around an idea, the performer creates a ‘programme’ – a set of instructions with indications of how to accomplish them. (Noting that a programme could include the instruction: ‘Find a skilled violin player to perform JS Bach’s Violin Concerto in A Minor’ or could ask someone to perform actions they had conceived, or invite viewers to activate their propositions.)

To be honest, I struggle a little at first with seeing what is new or different about this approach, as the ‘performance text’ (as opposed to the scripted ‘play’) has been a mainstay of practice for many years. But after some reflection, I come to what I think might be a good understanding, which is that the ‘performance text’ or ‘script’ is what is created at the end of a dramaturgical process (whatever that process might be: improvising, writing, devising, designing, setting up quests or proposed actions), whereas the ‘performance programme’ is a starting point, a provocation to create.

I am interested in where Cambar Coletivo’s work sits in relation to other artists working in similar ways. Is there any direct relationship, or is it that a number of contemporary artists are influenced by the same things? For example, both Cambar Coletivo and the UK’s Wrights and Sites (also a collective of four artists, who work both individually and collectively) use the process of ‘drifting’ in their work.

James Turpin has heard of the work of Wrights and Sites (mostly through their magnificent Mis-Guides), but says that the use of drifting in Cambar’s work is heavily influenced (as is Wrights and Sites) by the ‘dérive’ of the International Situationists. He quotes Quentin Stevens in The Ludic City: ‘The dérive encouraged situations: the bringing together of aspects of the city which were previously separated in time or space. This convergence created temporary changes in social conditions’. The Situationists’ aim was to understand ‘the urban environment as the terrain of a game in which one participates’ and their dérive highlights that ‘wandering is not purely a matter of chance, but can also be a practice of intentional experimentation, drawing upon the dynamism and the potential for play which was latent in the urban milieu.’ Or as Roberto puts it, ‘the dérive invites us to see the city in a different way’ offering an invitation to: ‘Scour the city for places not yet travelled to’.

When questioned about the company’s influences, all four say that everyday life is their biggest inspiration. As Flávio puts it: ‘Everyday life in all its micro-diversity. I like to focus my attention on life’s most insignificant details, looking at the corners, the edges which nobody wants to see; the unspoken, the undefined, the things lacking clear outline. I like to observe people and their behaviour, which are often contradictory. And this of course includes me too.’ Raquel says: ‘My inspirations start from an everyday sense of what my eyes see; the vibrations that resonate through the skin…’ And for Roberto: ‘Observing animals and children brings me to a very interesting creative state. I like their absolute sincerity; the simplicity of their presence, the way they observe without shame.’

When asked which artists the collective admire, the answers are as eclectic as could be: Joseph Beuys, Pina Bausch, Antonin Artaud, Charlie Chaplin, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Jacques Lecoq… James and Raquel both cite Mestre Pastinha, a visionary master of Capoeira Angola who was a poet, musician, artist, and writer who helped to maintain important traditions within the art of Capoeira. Roberto mentions Samuel Beckett, amongst a list that includes Hieronymus Bosch and Brazil’s Taanteatro: ‘Beckett I like a lot as he formalises the flow of thought, turns the subject into shape…’ Flávio also highlights the importance of honouring the less well-known current generation of artists: people like Shima and Thaíse Nardim; and Salvador-based Olga Lamas and Lucas Valentim (who are part of the Nucleo Vagapara group). James has some positive things to say about people he admires from the UK scene: ‘Will Dickie. Jonathan Grieve and Nwando Ebizie from Mas Productions. Also Sleepwalk Collective, Action Hero, Joshua Sofaer and his work on audience participation; and the late Adrian Howell’s ground-breaking work with one-on-one performances.’

And like his colleagues, James cites the other artists of Cambar Coletivo as being amongst his influences and inspirations. ‘I think it is important to have that respect and admiration for those close to you and your work, just as much as it is to have an admiration for artists that are perhaps more distant.’

This, perhaps more than anything, is at the heart of the success of Cambar Coletivo: four artists who have, at the core of their work, a shining love of each other and admiration for each other as individuals and as artists. From the outside, it might be tempting to think that such a love affair will never last: the thing is, though, that these four have already been through the growing pains of relationship through the intensity of their experiences together in the seven-year story that was the evolution, development, and demise of Hotel Medea. The extraordinary heritage of this project lives on in the work of Cambar Coletivo, who are making their mark with another challenge to what we see as ‘theatre’ or ‘performance’ practice.

So what of the future? Raquel: ‘The plans are to continue to make, share, create, explore move, search, learn and be involved in an eternal cycle of growth.’ Well, in that is everything, a whole world – and everything within that world shifts and moves and tilts, in permanent playful instability.

For more on Cambar Coletivo’s four artists and their projects see www.cambarcoletivo.com

Forced Entertainment: The Notebook

Awe and wonder: Forced Entertainment, masters of the fragmented narrative, shock us with a linear narrative based on a novel – The Notebook, by award-winning Hungarian-Swiss author Agota Kristof, first published in Paris as Le Grand Cahier. And what a corker of a story: a reflection on the terrors of war, on the effect of war and its aftermath on civilian populations, and on morality in the face of violence, which is staged with stunningly beautiful simplicity – theatre stripped back to its bare essentials.

Two little boys, unnamed twins who think, act and talk as one person, arrive from the Big Town. They are clean and combed, dressed in white shirts and patent leather shoes. Their mother is taking them to live with their grandmother, known locally as ‘the witch’, as the country they live in is at war and it is deemed safer for them to stay with her in the countryside. The grandmother has never met these ‘sons of a bitch’ so has little interest in looking after them– but begrudgingly takes them in. The boys are told that they have to work to eat, and at first they refuse, but after a few days sleeping in the garden and living on raw vegetables, they acquiesce. ‘Oh, so you feel sorry for me now!’ says the grandmother as they help her haul her barrow along the track to market. ‘No’ say the boys, answering (as always) in unison ‘ We didn’t feel sorry, we felt ashamed’. This moment, the arrival of shame, marks the dawning of morality. As the war progresses, the challenges to the boys’ moral code become ever-more complex as bestiality, blackmail, sexual abuse, rape, murder, assisted suicide, sacrifice of others versus personal survival, deportation of undesirables, and the ransacking of the bodies of eyeless soldiers all present themselves as opportunities to test them. What is so beautifully realised theatrically is that we are so totally taken into the closed world of the boys’ terrifying logic and intelligence that we unequivocally understand and support every decision they make.

We are in fairy-tale mode here: a world of archetypes (the witch, the soldier, the priest, the housekeeper, the hare-lipped girl) living in an unnamed country in which there are occupiers and liberators – the liberators proving to be more terrible than the occupiers. Agota Kristof’s novel names her child protagonists, and makes it clear that the story is that of her homeland, Hungary. Forced Entertainment make the dramaturgical decision to remove the names and move it into a universal tale that could be any place in any time – a fable of war past, present and future. The details are depressingly familiar.

The story is told by two male actors dressed in matching mouse-grey suits and red woolly jumpers, clutching big exercise books, which they read from. The stage is bare, furnished only with two dark-wood chairs. Two hours go by in a flash. We sit riveted as the tale unfolds, pictures painted purely through the power of words. Words that, in accordance with the closed world of the twins depicted, follow the rules of the boys’ own notebook compositions: ‘the faithful depiction of facts… what is, what we see, what we hear, what we do’. Nouns and verbs: the chickens have their legs tied together to be taken to market; the boys smell of mushrooms, mould, manure. No qualifiers needed – adjectives are scorned. Fact: grandmother wears no underpants; lifts her skirt and pisses wherever she is. Fact: the foreign officer asks the boys to piss on him. There is no comment offered on these or any other facts relayed to us. Emotions are to be avoided – although they creep in under the door: ‘Loving a walnut is not the same as loving our mother’ they say, and you feel their young hearts breaking. To counteract this, they train themselves in emotional toughness by calling each other names, then endearments, to break the power of words. Pig, demon, darling, lover – words, just words, that will never again hurt or charm.

Staging a novel might be new for Forced Entertainment, but The Notebook is a classic FE show. First, there’s the power of words, delivered without unnecessary emoting: no (over) acting required. Think Speak Bitterness, for example, or the more recent Tomorrow’s Parties. I’m reminded of the advice that both Rudolf Steiner and Bruno Bettleheim gave on the reading or telling of fairy tales: the storyteller stays neutral, presents the words; the listener can absorb the horror and the moral of the story if they aren’t being terrorised by the teller of the tale. Next there’s the staging. Chairs, of course, have played a crucial role in many of the company’s productions. And there’s the actors: the story is held perfectly by Robin Arthur and Richard Lowdon, who like the twins in the story have stood side-by-side reciting words together for decades: two-handers that eschew dialogue in favour of alternating storytelling direct to audience are a staple of the company’s work. Then there’s the tighter-than-tight dramatic structure: although the show appears to be very simply staged, the space and everything in it is choreographed with precision. The beginnings and endings of scenes are denoted by the moving of a chair, or by one or both actors standing up or sitting down or walking across the space. As the piece progresses, and the possibility of division of the seemingly indivisible twosome begins to suggest itself, it is more likely that the actors will not be identically posed, holding their exercise books in a different way, sitting or standing with the suggestion of a separate identity. Occasionally there is a subtle change of lighting state – turquoise and straw-white lights giving a bright but slightly other-worldly feel to the performance space. I should also mention that FE’s incorrigible sense of subversive humour is as strong as ever– comedy shining a light on even the darkest of moments. Great theatre, and such a delight to see Forced Entertainment finding new ways of working after thirty years of success offering a variety of uses of enchantment.

The Notebook is presented at BAC as part of LIFT, and in tandem with After a War, a series of immersive performances and installations, co-curated by Forced Entertainment’s artistic director Tim Etchells and LIFT’s Mark Ball, which features work by Stan’s Café, Lola Arias, Inua Ellams, The Tiger Lillies, and Tim Etchells, amongst many other artists.

Fly Me To The Moon: Norfolk and Norwich Festival 2014

Norwich ahoy! Tagged as ‘one of the UK’s big four’ festivals, Norfolk & Norwich (NNF) is also one the country’s oldest, if not the oldest, arts festival – it can trace its roots back to 1772, don’t you know! This year’s programme at NNF is a little depleted, compared to some recent years, it must be said – but nevertheless offered an interesting and engaging mix of local, national and international work.

The big international theatre draw of the 2014 programme was Dmitry Krymov’s Opus 7, also presented in three other UK venues/festivals (and reviewed by Total Theatre at the Brighton Festival). Obviously, it makes sense that work of this scale from countries far afield (Russia, in this case) travels to a number of venues. But it would have been nice to see some N&N ‘exclusives’ on the international theatre front, as has been the case in previous years. National touring talent on show included David Leddy’s Long Live the Little Knife, previously seen by Total Theatre at Edinburgh Fringe 2013 and Brighton Festival 2014. The programme also included the world premiere of Pioneer by Curious Directive, a Norwich-based company with a national profile. But that was it for theatre – there seemed to be an emphasis on music in this year’s festival. A mere three theatre shows programmed seems rather slight, unless we count the street arts programme and the late-night [Live] Art Club – more on both of those later.

Local but on a grand scale was the site-responsive Souvenir by The House Project, a music piece which sounded delightful, featuring a quartet of composers (including Orlando Gough, who is well-versed in quirky crossover music/contemporary performance /audience interaction projects), the Bold as Brass ensemble, a choir, and numerous singers and performers animating hidden corners of Holkham Hall and its grounds. Word is out that this one-night-only extravaganza (and NNF exclusive) was an immense success.

The other big NNF exclusive that I did manage to see was the UK debut of S, the new show by Australian circus superstars Circa. Norfolk & Norwich Festival have a great reputation for promoting and celebrating the best in international circus – last year they presented the only UK appearance of the latest show by Montreal’s 7 Doigts de la Main with Séquence 8, and not one but two shows by Circa, the Spiegeltent special Beyond, and the captivating and beautiful How Like An Angel, seen in the equally captivating and beautiful Norwich Cathedral – this a site-responsive classical music/circus collaboration which was the brainchild of former N&N director Jonathan Holloway. S is a very different kettle of fish to either of the aforementioned Circa shows – although with some inevitable overlap in the ‘tricks’ and motifs used. Yes, there were clear glass bowls of water involved! (For those readers not familiar with Circa’s work, they have developed a trademark object manipulation scene using clear glass bowls of water balanced on various body parts that seems to find its way into every show in some permutation. But that’s OK with me – visual artists repeat motifs from exhibition to exhibition, so I think it is fine if performing artists do too.)

What makes S different to anything else I’ve seen by Circa is the tenderness. The first 45 minutes of the show involves no circus equipment, and is a beautifully soft, sinuous, seductive, sensuous (you get the idea) meditation on the individual / group relationship and on the nature of ‘support’, which sits (stands, climbs, falls) very comfortably between dance and circus. In what can perhaps be described as a marriage made in heaven of acrobalance and classic contact improvisation or ‘release’ techniques, bodies move and sway in standing groups; are swung and caught with breathtaking ease; climb into three-man (or woman) towers, then topple; test the ability to ‘take weight’ to its limits – a woman in a full backbend ‘crab’ position bases a man standing on her stomach. Sometimes things are gentle and flowing; sometimes there’s a more staccato or chaotic energy. The soundtrack is sublime: mixing works by Kimmo Pohjonen, Samuli Kosminen and the Kronos Quartet with live amplified breath, silence (yes!), and the sounds of ringing phones or chiming bells. I think I heard a didgeridoo as well at one point. After 45 minutes, it’s a rather different show as the equipment comes into play: hoop, often just one, used with wonderful precision; a very able straps act with a lovely upward climb; silks – a tempestuous routine set on three pairs of black hanging cloths, the black-on-black aesthetic throwing the hanging bodies into the light; and the aforementioned glass bowls. Costumes are deceptively simple: leotards, leggings, body-suits, fitted trousers, of different designs but all in the same soft body-hugging black material. Lighting states remind me of previous Circa show Wunderkammer: a dark stage with atmospheric spots focused on the lone body or group, or dramatically lit by back-wall Perspex blocks of colour (electric blue, red, green), or highlighted by rows of duel-coloured overhead LEDS – violet and orange, say – clear-cut, geometric, stylishly in service to the performance. Although the visual aesthetic of the piece recalls Wunderkammer (which wowed crowds and won awards at Edinburgh Fringe 2013), this is a very different show. Gone is the cynical ‘circus soft porn’ sexiness, and in its place a beautiful reflection on, and demonstration of, the human state – sometimes alone, sometimes together, always in relation to ‘the other’. The sinuous S is a far finer show than the crash-bang-wallop audience-pleaser that is Wunderkammer, in this reviewer’s opinion, and its UK debut deservedly garners a standing ovation from the circus-savvy Norwich Theatre Royal audience.

Elsewhere, a new initiative for the Norfolk & Norwich Festival 2014 was the late-night [Live] Art Club, presented by Norwich Arts Centre in collaboration with East by South East – a showcase led by the Basement, Brighton. So even when I escape Brighton for a weekend, Brighton finds a way to follow me…

The Norwich Arts Centre is a delightful venue, set in an old church on the edge of the city centre. Artists presented over the festival include Total Theatre favourites Rachel Mars, Chris Dobrowolski, 30 Bird, Ross Sutherland, Kindle Theatre, and Sylvia Rimat (with a linked appearance in a pop-up café somewhere in Norwich by Hunt & Darton). A magnificent line-up! On the evening I was there, I had the pleasure of seeing Stacy Makishi, performing her new solo show The Falsettos. Sitting somewhere between stand-up and performance art, this is an entertaining and engaging show born of autobiographical material – American born in Hawaii, menopausal, re-evaluating her relationship with her ageing mother – which is weaved expertly into musings on murder real and fictional: a family killing in Hawaii; the artist’s obsession with Tony Soprano. At one point, she voices the taboo thought that killing off her elderly mother might be kinder than letter her slip into further dementia and decay. Then, there’s the dazzling joy of hearing Barbra Streisand sing ‘On a Clear Day’. Life goes on! Stacy is a very amenable performer – she starts off in an armchair onstage, greeting the audience as they come in, and moves with ease from gentle banter into a more poetic and abstracted use of text and physical action, interweaved by snatches of film clips, news bulletins, and excerpts from TV drama The Sopranos. It’s just not been the same since the ducks left… The subject matter of the show is ageing, decay and death – actual death and the death of fertility that comes with menopause. This could be depressing but it’s not: ultimately, this is a life-affirming show – life has its challenges, we all die, but for now, here we all are, sharing something together: ‘hope comes in many forms’.

A word here also for the artists (whose names I missed) who post-Makishi were animating the corridors and bar of this lovely building with gentle interventions that included rolling on bubblewrap, and tying objects to balloons – I had to hurry away so didn’t have time to engage with what they were doing with full attention, but I enjoyed what I saw and appreciated the whole-building-animation that seemed to be the order of the day at Norwich Arts Centre – a venue I intend to return to another time.

Finally, no mention of Norfolk & Norwich Festival would be complete without a reference to Chapelfield Gardens, host to the Adnams Spiegeltent and The Garden Party. The Spiegeltent programme for 2014 was, as always, an eclectic mix of ‘tent’ favourites: vintage dancing delights with Ragroof Tea Dances (declaration of vested interest: these are my reason for being here in beautiful Norwich), buffoonery from Red Bastard, a greatest-hits show for Bourgeois and Maurice’s 7^th Birthday Party, spoof Kunst Rock from Die Roten Punkte, and sultry torch singing from the fabulous Camille O’Sullivan, who I think of as the ultimate and archetypal Spiegeltent performer. On the night I’m there (post- tea dance), it’s the turn of Orkestra del Sol, presenting their fabulous mix of Ska, Balkan and Klezmer merriment – how lovely to be invited to dance a polka on a Sunday night!

Out in the garden, which was luckily graced with a weekend of early summer sunshine, Wet Picnic presented their latest street theatre show The Lift, which looked to have a similar aesthetic and tone to their highly successful first show The Dinner Table. I missed the show, being in tea dance mode at the very time Wet Picnic took to the gardens, but I heard the company rehearsing backstage saw the marvellously designed lift go trotting by like a kind of Art Deco sedan chair on its way to its spot! I like the concept – the audience experiencing fragments of life through encounters in the lift – but can’t comment on how successful it was. One of the problems with performing in street festivals is that you think you are going to catch lots of work by other people, but are inevitably performing yourself, or doing a get-in or get-out, at the very time the thing you really want to see is on…

Ramshakilicious’ Grime I did see as it was on in the evening. It is an update of the Punch and Judy story (with a touch of Sweeney Todd), an ‘ordinary everyday tale of a dysfunctional family’ set in a dodgy burger bar. It’s a step up in scale for the company, whose previous work I’ve enjoyed greatly. Grime features a fabulous set: a kind of open-fronted steampunk doll’s house, with higgledy-piggledy rooms, wobbly walkways, and shaky staircases built above and to the side of the chrome-fronted burger bar. The show goes up as the sun goes down, and the house is lit up with fairy lights, like some sort of terrible take on the witch’s cottage in the woods in Hansel and Gretel. Live music and clowning combine to tell the terrible tale of ‘meat, meat, meat’ – a tale which on the opening night of the show was a little too long and drawn out: an hour and 20 minutes is 30 minutes longer than any street show needs to be, and although some of the over-length was due to technical problems, it also needs a great deal of dramaturgical chopping to really cut the mustard. Always a dilemma – street theatre has to be rehearsed in public, and shows tend to come into their own in their second year. In their previous work, Ramshakilicious have had a lovely direct engagement with their audience – in Grime they feel distant and cut-off from their audience for most of the show, so apart from problems with the length and structure of the piece, work needs to be done on how to translate their skills into larger-scale work. They are working under the direction of veteran street theatre performer Flick Ferdinando, so I’m sure they’ll get there eventually.

The Astronaut’s Caravan, on the other hand, is a small but perfectly formed piece (created by the resourceful fairground engineer Tim Hunkin and legendary sculptor/automata maker Andy Plant) that falls into the kind of alternative sideshow/booth territory occupied so well by companies like Whalley Range All Stars. A caravan is suspended on an axis, spinning round 360º like an odd-bod fairground ride – which is almost what it is. Audience groups of around seven or eight people enter the caravan, and are seated in a row on a bench with a roller-coaster style safety bar in front of them. The caravan is kitted out in vintage 70s style – duck-egg blue cupboards, Formica, orange plastic cups, gingham curtains. Our friendly astronaut-pilot – who has the air of a Norfolk Broads boatman – gives the all-clear to his companion outside, through a mouthpiece that looks like a sink plunger connected to a hosepipe. Then off we sail to see the Milky Way – or at least, to see the tree-tops of Chapelfield Gardens. Around and round we spin, giddy as goats. Or do we? It’s the old ‘is our train moving or is the one on the adjacent platform moving?’ conundrum – very clever, a perfect piece of fun for all ages that for me was the highlight of The Garden Party 2014. Well, that and our Dirty Dancing themed tea dance anyway!

Norfolk and Norwich Festival 2014 ran 9–25 May.

Dorothy Max Prior attended the festival 17–18 May 2014.

Mirror, Mirror on the World: A Bouffon Seduction in Catalonia

It is Maundy Thursday, the eve of the holiest day of the year in the Christian calendar (Good Friday). Here in the ancient Roman town of Vic in Catalonia, a procession is taking place. Processions of penitents are the norm across Spain in Holy Week. Wearing face-concealing black or purple pointy hats, dressed as centurions, bearing crosses or flaming torches, waving flags, carrying massive floats adorned with statues of the Madonna, flowers, and candles, they parade through the streets for hours with a steady step-brush of their sandaled feet.

But this procession is a little different. From across the massive sand-strewn expanse of the square comes a dragoon of bouffons, bearing a great blank flag. One of them does indeed have a black pointy hat, but he also has bare legs, big boots and a number of dismembered cuddly toys poking out from under his fur coat. Another has a lizard’s tail and a jester’s hat. There’s egg-box armour, demented beehive hairdos, furry boots, big bottoms, swollen breasts, puffed-out chests. Step-brush, step-brush, step-brush. What do they want with the people of Vic? They are here to make a proclamation! It starts as a re-iteration of key articles from the Declaration of Human Rights in a medley of languages, the buffoons enacting scenes of mock torture much enjoyed by the younger members of the audience. La vida! La libertad! La seguretat! Ha ha ha! It ends with the Oda a la Merda (Ode to Shit) – a satirical Catalan poem on the human condition: ‘Salut, oh merda! Materia que agermana les persones malaltes o be sanes, el ric i el pobre, el savi i l’ignorant.’ (All hail the shit! The stuff that unites the sick and the healthy, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant.’) Shit the great equalizer: even the queen needs to take a shit – and here she comes, resplendent in pink chiffon, armed with her trusty toilet roll. The proclamation over, the buffoons roll up their flag and head off to who-knows-where…

But where did they come from? Bouffons, I have learnt, are born fully-formed. They appear from cracks in the ground, from the backs of broken TV monitors, from the debris of a tsunami or a nuclear disaster. They are not human – in fact, they don’t actually exist at all, they are a product of the audience’s subconscious. The bouffon has no opinions – he or she just knows. The bouffon holds a mirror up to the audience, reflecting their deepest darkest fears. Indeed, the bouffon holds a mirror up to the whole world. This, she says, is what you look like. Aren’t you funny! A bouffon works in the comic register, but is not a clown. We laugh at – or with – the clown’s human folly. The bouffon laughs at us.

The word ‘bouffon’ has come to us as a theatrical term through the work of Jacques Lecoq. The derivation of the word (and indeed of the English word buffoon) is a Latin verb: buffare, to puff, to fill the cheeks with air. Giovanni Fusetti, in an essay called The Ecstasy of Mocking elucidates on the nature of the bouffon: ‘A bouffon exists to mock, to represent elements of his or her society in an amplified, distorted, exaggerated way, therefore provoking laughter or outrage. Their purpose is to have fun mocking humans and therefore they use everything they find.’ However, it is important to note that the bouffon’s satire ‘never touches individual or private themes’. Politics, power, money, finances, morality, war, the army, science, education – these are all fair game. So it is the institutions and cultural mores of humanity that are the targets of the scorn rather than individuals.

The bouffon might exist in his or her own universe, holding our world in the palm of their hand, but behind every bouffon is an actor, and ‘the actor is always in charge’ as Marian Masoliver and Maria Codinachs say repeatedly throughout the week-long Bouffon Workshop which they are co-teaching at The Actors Space (just 20 minutes drive away from Vic, up into the Catalonian hills) in the week before Easter. This becomes almost a mantra throughout the duration of the workshop. For just five days – days which each feel like a lifetime, such a rich amount of experiences are contained in each – this group of fourteen actors have been learning the true meaning of that mantra for the art of the bouffon: how to take on the mantel of the bouffon, to don a whole-body-mask that allows you to say and do the things that your bouffon would say or do, then once the work is done, to lay that mask aside and become yourself again. Sometimes the subjects we are dealing with are difficult – violence, abuse, suicide, torture – but we are reminded again and again that this is theatre, this is play, this is not the present-moment reality for us. We can and must learn to put some space between ourselves and our material, however harrowing that material might be. This is an important concept, reiterated many times over by the team of Lecoq-inspired teachers at The Actors Space. Speaking to Maria and Marian over a lunch break, both teachers relay the belief that ‘the actor needs to be comfortable’ by which they mean comfortable physically and mentally. There needs to be space and distance, Marian says, to ‘play’ the character, not be the character. To play the suffering, not be the suffering. It needs to be a pleasure. But also a pleasure for the audience, Maria says, ‘not a masturbation’ with the actor too focused on his or her own pleasure to worry about anyone else! Indeed, the real ‘actors’ space’, says Marian, is inside the audience’s mind and heart.

The Actors Space is run by Marian Masoliver and Simon Edwards. Both are graduates of the Ecole Jacques Lecoq, but have many other strings to their respective bows – Marian as a performer with legendary Catalan company La Fura del Baus and with Kneehigh; Simon as a renowned teacher and director, travelling the world to work as a coach for comic actors working on stage or screen, directing, or delivering lectures. The Actors Space has, over the years, become a renowned international centre of theatre and film, providing high quality training for actors, directors, writers, teachers and students of dramatic art. It is housed in a beautiful old farmhouse nestling in the gorgeous Catalan hills, yet only an hour or so from Barcelona. Most of the courses at The Actors Space are taught by Marian and Simon – occasionally (as in this case) inviting in a guest teacher. Maria Codinachs is a friend and colleague from the Lecoq days and beyond. Since graduating from Ecole Jacques Lecoq in 1988, she has performed and taught throughout Europe (with an increasing emphasis on the teaching, which she feels is her calling in life, dedicating herself to ‘opening the creativity of others.’) She now mostly works in her native Catalonia, teaching a range of physical theatre skills – including neutral mask, Commedia, and bouffon – mostly at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona. ‘This is my holiday’ she says with a twinkle about teaching in Easter Week at The Actors Space!

From the very first session of the very first day, it is clear that both Maria and Marian are skilled teachers with a wealth of wonderful material to share. Each day is split into four sessions, three taught and one the ‘auto-cours’ in which work is prepared in small groups to show to the others on the following day. Some of the work is general Lecoq-inspired exercises – pushing and pulling the space with body parts, evoking the journey of the child, bringing the essence of an object (a corkscrew, say) into the physical body – and some are more specific to the study of bouffon. Cruelty for example – in day one it is straight in at the deep end with an exercise in lopping off heads and legs of imaginary enemies. Students are also, right from the first day, given tasks to work on in small groups, for presentation the next day. I’m here not just as a rapporteur but as a participant, and in my first ‘auto-cours’ I am paired with two others to create a science-gone-wrong scene about a botched experiment in robotics. We are urged in these first forays into devising bouffon to allow the politics of the playground into the game.

By day two, we’ve moved into visualising and making our bouffon characters – drawing our bouffon, adding key words to other people’s drawings, bringing the drawing and the words into physical action, and finally making our first tentative attempts to create our bouffon character using foam to exaggerate body parts, and finding costume items that we can adapt. For our second auto-cours, we are placed in a different ‘family group’ and sent out to create a short site-responsive piece based on fairy tales, set in the beautiful grounds of the house. We have by now amassed a long list of concepts and ideas that we are working with. ‘Cruelty’ has been joined by: rhythm, the energy of the chorus, stylised movement, impulse, working in gangs. Later in the week we embrace ‘power’ and ‘seduction’.

As the week progresses, we spend a fair amount of each day in our ever-evolving bouffon costumes. As we learn more about our bouffon, things are added or subtracted or modified. My one starts as a kind of twisted version of a floozy clown character I’ve developed in other times and places, but she soon shifts to something rather different; a kind of monsterish over-sexualised child-star. In my notebook, I’ve written of her birth: ‘…a Venus born not from the waves but from the back of airwaves, a creature that crawls out of a cracked TV screen. A cross between Miley Cyrus and Shirley Temple…’

Maria and Marian take turns leading sessions, but sometimes teach side-by-side, working with a complicity which they both call ‘rare and special’. We work on choral sound-making, ensemble physical actions, and eventually with given texts. Nothing is sacred: Nelson Mandela’s speeches, Harold Pinter’s address to the Nobel committee, the Declaration of Human Rights. All are plundered, mocked, deconstructed.

We are once again split into new ‘family groups’, and on day four present pieces based on a mix of the Declaration of Human Rights, a set of Nursery Rhymes, and the Catalan Oda a la Merda. These groups and their chosen texts get taken forward into the final day’s work. Following numerous reworkings and some much-appreciated direction from Maria and Marian, the day ends with the early evening presentations in the town square of Vic…

Having spent a week living and working so intensely with a group of fellow performers, it is naturally hard to say goodbye. Easing the pain a little is the knowledge that the Actors Space prides itself on being a holding space for the many members of the international theatre, film and performance community who have passed through its doors – there’s a ‘members’ section of their website for the posting of bibliographies and further notes, and the teachers are always willing to answer burning questions that come up after the workshop has finished. Maria and Marian’s Bouffon Workshop Easter 2014 was, surprisingly, the first-ever bouffon workshop at the Actors Space – but all agreed that it was a great success, so it will hopefully be repeated. In the meantime, there is their usual strong summer programme of clown, acting for stage or screen, and directing workshops on offer (see below).

A final note, as we leave the beautiful hills of Catalonia: Marian and Maria both strongly endorse Lecoq’s view that his teachings are not a ‘method’. ‘Keep the research going’ they say, ‘make it your own’. As I move off from this idyllic retreat back into my regular world, I feel that all that I’ve learnt is travelling with me – and that my bouffon is in there somewhere, waiting to burst out whenever she might be needed…

The Actors Space Bouffon Workshop took place 12–18 April 2014, led by Maria Codinachs and Marian Masoliver.

Summer School Workshops 2014 at The Actors Space:

The Creative Actor: 16–28 July 2014

Screen Acting: 3–11 August 2014

The Art of Comedy: 17–29 August 2014

Directing Performance: 6–12 August 2014

Free accommodation for students and people on a low income.

For more information please contact: info@actors-space.org

Maria Codinachs teaches at Institut del Teatre in Barcelona: www.institutdelteatre.cat

Photos by Pep Aligué

Circus Feria Musica: Sinué

Green, ochre and violet washes of light and blurry images of leaves and branches projected onto the back wall. Shadows of crouched figures poised high and low in a metal ‘tree’. A forest of ropes slung every which way across each other, with one straight-standing pole at the back. A hurdy-gurdy man with an arsenal of musical trinkets downstage right, and upstage centre a man with a big gong…

Sinué starts with echoes of Scarabeus’ Arboreal – a circus piece inspired by the Calvino story A Baron in the Trees, about a boy who refuses to come down, living in the tree-tops as a life-long protest (a popular story for circus artists, also featured in Iron Oxide’s Snails and Ketchup). Programme notes tell me that in the case of Sinué, by Belgian company Circus Feria Musica, the starting point is not Calvino but a children’s author called Anne Ducamp and her story Petit Jules, which the company describe as ‘grounded in the tension between the powerful desire to make progress – to grow up – and the fear that holds this back.’ A kind of riposte to Peter Pan, perhaps? Feel the fear and do it anyway!

Jules is represented onstage by five acrobats (four male, one female) – this dramaturgical decision gleaned from the programme notes rather than being transparent onstage: I had no idea this was what I was watching. That aside, the five Jules made a pretty good job of representing the grow up/grow down dichotomy of childhood. The ‘innocence’ of early childhood is represented by much joyful swinging through bars, climbing and sliding up and down the pole, and leaping from rope to rope with the agility and skill you’d expect from a top-notch international circus company. Particularly attention-grabbing is the female performer Natalia Fandino, known to UK audiences for her beautiful aerial work in NoFit State Circus’ award-winning Tabu. Here, she climbs and tumbles and swings along merrily with the boys, then in a scene that I take to represent adolescent excitement and insecurity, the onset of ‘experience’, she balances on and around a chair suspended from the tree cum tower structure, murmuring in Spanish. The only phrase I manage to catch properly (we assume that the words are there mostly for their sonic feel rather than semantic value) loosely translates as ‘this will be the last time…’ The ropes unravel, there’s some rather nice corde lisse work from another performer who has taken the spotlight in the story of the growing child, and eventually our five representations of Jules are all earth-bound. A lone figure contorts and curves his body along the ground; a chorus of bodies join him. With the knowledge that we are watching five representations of one person, the baton passed from performer to performer, it is clearer (with hindsight) to see and appreciate the power of the hero/chorus work of the piece.

The childhood pastoral idyll in the trees having ended, the onstage action becomes darker, louder and more frenetic. The percussionist moves into overdrive; the projected images become faster moving, less organic – lines, masts, elongated triangles – with an electric edge to the sound and the physical action. There’s some high-velocity juggling – very skilled and enjoyable to watch, but it is always hard to find ways for juggling to fit a narrative, even a very loose one as here: it is what it is. A corkscrew appears – there’s no other way to describe it or explain what it might represent – it’s a great big screw-end-of-a-corkscrew to be rolled and climbed in and around. It adds little to the piece other than novelty value.

More successful is a scene with an extremely bendy plank crossing over the metal tree-tower, a man poised perilously on the end in an eternal caught-before-jumping moment. Ah, life on the edge! Ultimately, the tree-tower is set free from its vertical position and turned into a kind of swinging boat/cradle/raft – lots of wild rocking and dropping and rescuing images that do aptly conjure up thoughts of the precarious balance between moving forward and holding back.

The skilled team of five international circus performers and two musicians end to rapturous applause from an enthusiastic Brighton Festival audience. Sinué is a big production, in many senses of that word, and in a lot of ways they’ve pulled it off. The central idea of an exploration of resistance to and embracing of the leaving behind of childhood is a lovely theme for a circus piece, offering multiple opportunities for the play between ground and air – Mauro Paccagnella’s choreography is energetic and engaging, with many welcome touches of whimsical humour. And it is always a pleasure to have live music with circus, especially if this involves a hurdy-gurdy-playing multi-instrumentalist.

There is always a dilemma reviewing a circus show with a narrative that doesn’t quite come off. Although the core notion of childhood development and embracing the adventures that life offered is there to see, finer details of the dramaturgical intention fall short, and it is hard to see what the company are actually trying to say about it all without resorting to the programme for elucidation (not that a discussion of the‘ sinuosities’ of vegetation helped). Also confusing is the programme claim that there are five representations of Jules (this from notes written by the company), whereas other sources talk of the four Jules. Does this then cast the female performer as the traditional female ‘other’? An unresolved mystery.

I left feeling happy to have been well entertained by a company of excellent circus performers in an interesting visual and aural environment – although not really challenged or shaken in any way theatrically. Perhaps that’s good enough!